Vacation: We’re Going to the Ocean By David L. Harrison Illustrated by Rob Shepperson Wordsong (an imprint of Boyd Mills Press) ISBN: 978-1-59078-568-3 Ages 7-9 On shelves now. How do you get a kid to read poetry? That’s something you want to do, right? Inundate them with a fine appreciation for a measured verse right […]

NYPL has lots of directors. Sure they do. It’s a big system. David Ferriero is one of them. Nice enough bloke. Stops by my children’s room sometimes. So it’s a touch unnerving to read a headline like NYPL’s Ferriero Nominated as Archivist of the United States. We can do that? Be the archivist of the […]

Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College Journal of Arts and Letters, is adding a Children’s and Young Adult section to its publication online this Friday, July 31st. They’ve also announced what you will find inside. Quite the line-up: Quietly, and then not so quietly, the call went out to those in the children’s literature field for […]

I think the lesson of the day here is that I haven’t been giving Lucy Cousins enough credit. While you may not be immediately familiar with her name, you’ve probably run into Cousins’s most famous creation, Maisy, at some point in your travels. Maisy is a mouse. Maisy is cute. Maisy is beloved by the 0-4 set. You haven’t lived until you’ve worked a reference desk where desperate two-year-olds come up to you like knee high zombies demanding, in their too high voices, your entire section of Maisy-related literature. Now because Maisy is so cute and non-threatening I was not initially impressed when I first heard about Yummy. Ms. Cousins wants to try her hand at fairy tales? Fine. It’ll probably be something along the lines of that Mary Engelbreit Nursery Tales collection. An early child introduction to fairy tales but without any of the original violent aspects. A watered down version, I’m sure. Well slap me upside the head and call me Charlie because I could not have been more wrong. Yummy is, if anything, the veritable antithesis to Engelbreit. With a good-natured, downright jovial tone of voice, Lucy Cousins takes old-fashioned stories and makes them as gruesome and funny as she is able.

For those of you in New York area: LITTLE AIRPLANE PRODUCTIONS OPENS THE DOORS TO THE LITTLE AIRPLANE CAFÉ SUNDAY, JULY 12 LIVE PERFORMANCE BY KIDS MUSIC SENSATION LAURIE BERKNER KICKS OFF NEW YORK’S NEWEST VENUE FOR FAMILIES NEW YORK, NY June 24, 2009 – Little Airplane Productions, creators of the popular preschool […]

So much for that whole we’re-going-to-cast-an-unknown idea for the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie. From Cynopsis Kids: Fox 2000 ‘s big screen version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid will star Zachary Gordon (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, The Brothers Bloom) as middle schooler Greg Heffley, THR . Directed by Thor Freudenthal, the movie […]

Neil Armstrong is My Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me By Nan Marino Roaring Brook (a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing) $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-59643-499-8 Ages 9-12 On shelves now Whisper "historical fiction" in a kid’s ear and you may see them blanch and cringe at the thought. Ugh. History. And history in fiction? […]

All right, all right. First things first. I’ve a personal stake, as it were, in bloggers of professional children’s literature-related publications. Horn Book has its Roger Sutton. SLJ has me and a bunch of other folks. PW has ShelfTalker. PBS has Booklights. And essentially I figured that was that. End of story. Unless Bulletin of […]

M3: Sir John Hargrave’s Mischief Maker’s Manual By Sir John Hargrave Additional help by Rob Cockerham, Ted Hammond, and Dusty Deyo Grosset & Dunlap (an imprint of Penguin) ISBN: 978-0-448-44982-1 Ages 9 and up. On shelves now The prank in its purest form is custom made for children’s literature. Pranks are kids’ ways of grifting […]

Well all the talk this week was of the Alice in Wonderland trailer that premiered on the web. Disney pulled it from YouTube so I have had to use other methods of placing it here. It’s strange that for all the fanciness, I’m somewhat bored. There are elements that look like they might be interesting […]

Mural Watch! This one is pretty. So how do we feel about murals done by artists that aren’t children’s illustrators? It’s cool, I guess. But speaking from personal experience I always feel like it’s kind of a waste if you have a fabulous children’s illustrator living in your area and then you commission a children’s […]

Waiting for Winter By Sebastian Meschenmoser Kane/Miller $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-935279-04-4 Ages 4-8 On shelves now. My reviewing process is very neat and orderly. As I read books I place them on my To Be Read shelf, where they are cataloged by those most likely to get a review to those least likely. Everything has its […]

The other day I linked to the Dianthe McBride SLJ piece about what book publishers should make more or less of. A subsequent response has appeared on, of all things, MSN Cinemama by the great author Martha Brockenbrough. Called Are We Letting Boys Become Book Bigots?, Ms. Brockenbrough takes issue with the idea that publishers should make […]

I am sitting at the Reference Desk when a nice older woman asks if she might be able to use the catalog. I lead her over to our catalog computer, as I am wont to do, and all is well. Minutes later the woman is back. She mentions that she is an author and she […]

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About A Fuse #8 Production

Features everything from librarian previews of upcoming children's books to news, reviews, and videos. If it has something to do with children's literature, it will rate a mention here.

Betsy Bird is the Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She's reviewed for The New York Times and Kirkus, writes articles for Horn Book and SLJ, and wrote the picture book Giant Dance Party. You can contact her at Fusenumber8@gmail.com or follow her on . . .